Magna Techa

Using a Nexus 4 as a Development Device with Ubuntu

2013-09-23

Back when I first began developing Android apps, it wasn't very easy to set up an actual device to debug an app. To do this with Ubuntu, I often had to change udev rules according to the manufacturer of the device I had at the time. A pain in the butt. I recently got back into Android development and I needed to set up my environment to deploy apps to a Nexus 4. This is extremely easy in Ubuntu, now.

All you need to do is turn on debugging on your Nexus 4 and Eclipse/Android ADT/Ubuntu will detect it the next time you run your app. To turn debugging on, just go to Settings on your phone, scroll to the bottom to click on Developer options, then select USB Debugging.